A review by davidwright
The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre

5.0

Not long ago I and a bunch of folks I know read and loved Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, a beautiful melancholy novella about a restaurant’s last shift, so you know I was intrigued when a friend told me about a book she said was like the French version of O’Nan. Indeed, in many ways the books are doppelgangers: brief, wistful stories of what happens to the staff when the restaurant they work in shuts down. The effect is similar yet also strikingly different, O’Nan’s book set in the bleak midwinter while Fabre’s is more autumnal both in setting and tone. Pierre is the aging barman in a Paris café that seems to have lost its manager. Nobody really knows what is going on, and it is assumed that the boss is off on a fling with the regular waitress, ‘out sick’ with the grippe. To say more would be to give away what little plot there is, in a book that isn’t really about plot at all, but about the wistful, amused, and somewhat lost outlook of its sad clown narrator. Pierre’s gently self-deprecating delivery and disarming candor resists the dramatic, and yet such offhand observations as “All of that to be served chop-chop, with all these people lined up in front of me at the bar, I don’t really know them but I’ve been serving them day after day for a good thirty years,” speak volumes without every raising their voice. Life goes by, the weather changes, a new girl comes on to help out, the commuters come and go, and the bartender listens to the countless confidences of strangers which mean everything and nothing at all. Unlike O’Nan’s American workers, there is less sense of betrayal, with Pierre seeming to accept his life’s limits with a modest Gallic shrug. "I get off at seven but I'm never a stickler about leaving on time, what have I got to do at home? I'm just a barman, and the longer I stay on the more life goes by in the best possible way. So there we are." There we are indeed.